By Introduction from Rand: I care deeply about the consulting world in digital marketing. These people are my friends, my colleagues, my fellow speakers, and my investors. Their fears, concerns, successes, and trends are bellwethers for our field as a whole. Is AI hurting or helping marketers? Is the Zero Click costing them clients or gaining
The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create
By Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something shaped like a ball bouncing around a pinball-machine. These modern buyer journeys bounce back and forth between channels and content in ways that can’t be readily modeled nor cleanly attributed (despite
The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel
By I like the marketing funnel. It’s a great analogy, and has served me well for years. I *STILL* think it works reasonably well as a way to describe how businesses experience the various points at which they engage/interact with users before they become customers. But, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend
Welcoming Kristy Morrison as Chief of Staff
By Story time—late last year, I developed a painful, still-undiagnosed condition in my hands, likely from repetitive stress. Blah blah chronic pain, it’s hard to work, typing and mousework for more than 45 minutes in a row is unbearable, I’ve been to lots of doctors, followed lots of random Internet advice, whatever… I don’t really like
NEW: Upload your agency’s logo and customize your audience research graphs
By It’s new feature month over here at SparkToro (given we’ve just launched Take Action and the enhanced usage-graph visuals), and we’re continuing the streak with the long-requested addition of white labeled, exportable graphs. Now, with an Agency/Enterprise tier account, you can: It’s an especially nice upgrade for consultants and agencies who use SparkToro, but in-house
NEW: AI Tool & Social Network Usage Graphs are in SparkToro
By SparkToro’s data visualization just got a major upgrade, but rather than tell you about it, I’ll show you: BOOM. Rather than the previous visualization showing only the usage vs. country-level average, the new graph displays exactly the information you’ve been requesting: the percentage of the audience you search for that uses any given search engine
NEW in SparkToro: Take Action combines real audience data with LLM magic to give you actionable marketing takeaways
By Let me lay out the biggest challenges folks tell us they have with SparkToro in 2025: And now, I’m going to show you how my cofounder Casey Henry, our VP Marketing, Amanda Natividad, and my Chief of Staff, Kristy Morrison, solved that problem: And, finally, today, launch it. To everyone. With a free version anyone
Stop Asking Your Guest Speakers to Do Your Marketing for You
By I hate asking people for things. Call it years of ingrained people-pleasing if you want, but mostly, it comes from my not wanting to waste anybody’s time, including my own. So when I ask you to co-present with me in a webinar or event, it’s because there’s nobody else I wanted to ask. You were
We’ve Learned More About How to Appear in AI Answers
By Thanks to some recent experiments and research in the marketing world (and an unfortunate, manipulative attack by a Reddit mod), we’ve learned a lot more about how to influence the answers AI tools provide. This is particularly relevant for those seeking to have their brand names (or websites) appear when ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini, or
Content as a Service (CaaS): The Framework That Aligns Marketing with the Business
By Marketing often treats content like a vending machine. Sales needs a case study, so you fill in the template. Check the next row on the spreadsheet, write a blog post about that keyword. Insert a Jira ticket, get a graphic version of that blog post. That’s how you end up “keeping the lights on” with